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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

When I wrote about personalized medicine solutions that are available today, I mostly covered the data aspects of personalized medicine. It’s a logical place to start since the basis of personalized medicine is data. In that post I highlighted the SAP Foundation for Health and the SAP Hana platform along with the work of ASCO and their CancerLinQ project. No doubt there are hundreds of other examples around health care where data is being used to personalize the care that’s provided.

It makes a lot of sense for a company like SAP to take on the data aspects of personalized medicine. SAP is known for doing massive data from complex data sets. They’re great at sorting through a wide variety of data from multiple sources and they’re even working on new innovations where they can analyze your data quickly and effectively without having to export every single piece of data to some massive (Translation: Expensive) enterprise data warehouse. Plus, in many cases they’re doing all of this health data analytics in the cloud so you can be sure that your healthcare analytics solution can scale. While this is a huge step forward, it is just the start.

As I look at the discussion around personalized medicine, what seems to be missing is a focus on creating a connection with the patient. Far too often, analytics vendors in healthcare just want to worry about the data analysis and don’t build out the tools required to engage with the patient directly. This leads to poor patient engagement in two ways: improving patient communication and collecting patient data.

Improving Patient Communication
As we look into the future of reimbursement in healthcare, it’s easy to see how crucial it will be to leverage the right data to identify the right patients. However, you can’t stop there. Once you’ve identified the right patients, you have to have a seamless and effective way to regularly communicate with that patient. As value based reimbursement becomes a reality, no healthcare analytics solution will be complete without the functionality to truly engage with the patient and improve their health.

Patient engagement platforms will require the following three fundamentals to start improving care: interaction between patient and caregiver, privacy, and security. No doubt we’re already starting to see a wide variety of approaches to how you’ll communicate with and engage the patient. However, if you don’t get these three fundamentals down then all of the rest doesn’t really matter. The basis of improved patient communication is going to be efficient communication between patient and caregiver in a secure and private manner.

Collecting Patient Data
Too many analytics platforms only focus on the data that comes from the healthcare providers like the EHR. As the health sensor market matures, more and more clinically relevant data is going to be generated by the patient and the devices they use at home. In fact, in some areas like diabetes this is already happening. Over the next 5 years we’re going to start seeing this type of patient generated data spread across every disease state.

Health analytics platforms of the future are going to have to be able to handle all of this patient generated health data. The key first step is to make it easy for the patient to connect their health devices to your platform. The second step is to convert this wave of patient generated health data into something that can easily be consumed by the healthcare provider. Both steps will be necessary for personalized medicine to become a reality in health care.

As we head into HIMSS 2016 in a couple weeks, I’ll be looking at which vendors are taking analytics to the next level by including patient engagement. While there’s a lot of value in processing healthcare provider data, the future of personalized medicine will have to include the patient in both how we communicate with them and how we incorporate the data they collect the 99% of their lives spent outside of the hospital.

SAP is uniquely positioned to help advance personalized medicine. The SAP Foundation for Health is built on the SAP Hana platform which provides scalable cloud analytics solutions across the spectrum of healthcare. SAP is a sponsor of Influential Networks of which Healthcare Scene is a member. You can learn more about SAP’s healthcare solutions during #HIMSS16 at Booth #5828.

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